The editors of the Wall Street Journal explain why Americans aren’t doing victory laps over the state of the U. S. economy:

Real median earnings for full-time workers last year declined 1.6% and even more for high-school grads (3.3%). This means inflation outpaced wage gains for most low-wage workers. One culprit may be that workers logged fewer hours and less overtime as the labor market started to soften, especially in leisure, hospitality and manufacturing.

The upshot is that real median household income remains lower than in 2019 and has barely grown since 2020.

Americans have short memories but possibly long enough to remember when their wages were growing faster than inflation. Also, we’re spending a lot more on healthcare but not getting a lot more for it:

All told, federal healthcare spending has increased by more than $500 billion since 2019, yet this money hasn’t bought better health or coverage. The Administration has dangled more money for states to expand Medicaid for working-age, healthy adults under ObamaCare. Small employers have responded by paring back their health coverage.

The percentage of uninsured people is the same as it was in 2019 but more people are on Medicare and Medicaid.

It would be interesting to see the chart at the top of the page broken down by income quintile.

To the extent that there was a winner in last night’s presidential debate it was Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s easier to pick the losers. Trump lost by being Trump and we all lost from a nearly content-free debate. Most of all ABC’s moderators lost. They did not cut off microphones when they should have, showed bias, and failed to take note of the complete absence of substantive responses.

I materially agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated each other with the skill, knowledge and dignity befitting a great democracy on Tuesday—well, at least they appeared on stage together. Americans were able to see the candidates their two parties have bequeathed for President, for better or (mostly) worse.

Ms. Harris, less well known than the former President, had the most to gain and our guess is she helped herself. She clearly won the debate, though not because she made a powerful case for her vision or the record of the last four years. Though she kept talking about her “plan” for the economy, she largely sailed along on the same unspecific promises about “the future” that she has since Democrats made her the nominee.

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

The Vice President had help from the ABC News moderators, who were clearly on her side. They fact-checked only Mr. Trump, several times, though Ms. Harris offered numerous whoppers—on Mr. Trump’s alleged support for Project 2025, Mr. Trump’s views on in-vitro fertilization, and that no American troops are in a combat zone overseas.

Tell that last one to the Americans killed by Iranian proxies in Jordan this year or the U.S. Navy commanders tasked with intercepting Houthi missiles in the Red Sea.

If that so-called debate presages what we have to expect from the next 50 some-odd days of the campaign, the Harris campaign will be one of aspirations alone. Perhaps that will be good enough to prevail.

The editors conclude:

Flush with its candidate’s success, the Harris campaign on Tuesday night called for a second debate in October. But don’t expect her to sit for any in-depth interviews. That would be risky. This was the only scheduled debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, and given what we saw Tuesday, the nation will be grateful if it is the last.

Amen.

I’m seeing tons of unsolicited advice to both candidates on what they need to do or not to do in tonight’s debate. I have found nothing I thought was particularly worthwhile.

Against my reflexes I will probably watch the debate tonight. At least the debate itself. I’ll try to avoid the network commentary to the degree possible.

Anybody have any thoughts?

I think as long as neither candidate falls on his or her face the debate won’t make a great deal of difference and I expect full court presses from various directions claiming that one candidate or another did, in fact, fall on their face.

Like many I was appalled at the school shooting in Georgia last week. I am heartened that the father of the shooter was arrested and indicted as well as the kid. I have a question.

For the last 36 years, since the school shooting perpetrated by Laurie Dann in suburban Chicago, we’ve been aware of a tragic pattern. Parents who hide and coddle their seriously mentally ill children with violent urges. This time we hear that “he was on the FBI’s radar”. Here’s my question. Why isn’t there something in between looking on silently while violent mentally ill kids are enabled by their (probably also mentally ill) parents to go shoot up schools and locking kids up on suspicion? It would seem to me that such kids should, at least, have some sort of mandatory counseling.

If you have a NetFlix subscription you might want to check out Monsieur Spade. Have you ever wondered what happened to Sam Spade after the events of The Maltese Falcon? This limited series answers that question. Apparently, he went to France.

It’s an American-Anglo-French production, intelligently written and produced by Tom Fontana, the writer for St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street. Beautifully written (particularly by Clive Owens), acted, and directed, lots of French location shooting.

The graphic at the top of the page is from this report by Aaron Zitner and Adrienne Tong at the Wall Street Journal on which economic proposals from the the campaigns both Democrats and Republicans agree.

As you can see there is agreement on the topmost five proposals. I would like to see some analysis on the budget and fund impact of most of them. I’m skeptical that any of them is prudent. All I can say is if you think food and drug “deserts” are common now, wait until these proposals become law. With respect to taxing tips, why tax income at all? A prebated tax on consumption instead of an income tax would be economically more efficient.

Lance Morrow’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is not particularly uplifting but, at least to me, it has the ring of truth:

The essence of the case against Donald Trump: A democracy can’t be entrusted to an autocrat, especially one as unprincipled and unstable as he. He believes in the democratic process only when it affirms him and his sovereign ego. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot proved that. He is uniquely uncouth—barbarian, vulgarian, choose your word—and addicted to telling lies. He heads the vast MAGA cult of personality, and in that he resembles, say, Hong Xiuquan, who led the Taiping rebellion that devastated Qing Dynasty China in the 19th century. Hong believed himself to be the son of God, younger brother of Jesus Christ. Mr. Trump seems to be laboring under a similar delusion. So his enemies say.

The argument against Kamala Harris: Until the day before yesterday, almost everyone agreed she was a mediocre vice president. She was Joe Biden’s insurance policy. No one, the argument went, would want him to quit the presidency and leave it in the hands of such an empty suit.

Now, incredibly, she is Wonder Woman, high priestess of the Politics of Joy, a daughter of Jamaica and India come to rescue reactionary white America from itself. The Democrats in a few short weeks have mustered their own cult of personality around Ms. Harris, transfiguring the erstwhile hack into a world-historical heroine. Never has the power of spontaneous 21st-century image-spinning been so gloriously demonstrated.

The negative version goes deeper. If Mr. Trump is an autocrat, the entire Democratic program, as reposed in Ms. Harris, is also sinister and dictatorial. It has profoundly autocratic tendencies. Despite the Norman Rockwell pageantry of the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, the party, especially with the old San Francisco lefty Ms. Harris in the Oval Office, could be expected to impose the intolerant, ideological coercions and absolutism of what might be called the horribly virtuous. It would be cancel culture times 10. Her recent interview on CNN made clear that a President Harris would continue all Biden policies: on taxes, the border, Israel, Iran. Same policies, probably further to the left. So say Ms. Harris’s enemies.

He continues with a sunnier view of Trump:

He is a genuine though obnoxious patriot, whose policies on immigration, the economy, Russia, China and the Middle East would be stronger, more decisive and more credible than the weak, ambivalent performance of the Biden-Harris team. Mr. Trump, however much one might wonder at his bizarreness and bad manners, would be better for the country because his views are arguably more in sync with those of the American people. Simple as that.

and then of Harris:

She may, in truth, be an American miracle. The country has always been the story of a sequence of self-transcendences—of breakthroughs and evolutions. Think of the Jacksonian populism that empowered the people beyond the mountains, introducing a newer and wider vision of America. Think of the Civil War, which at great cost transformed the country. Or of the stupendous flood of immigration in the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. Or of the New Deal. Or of the 1960s, which introduced such seismic changes.

Perhaps it is true that Ms. Harris represents a breakthrough, a new evolution, a new future. Maybe she has been sent by America’s special providence to rescue the country from a spent generation of leaders, to tell the world: This is no country for old men.

I think the optimistic view of Vice President Harris is vanishingly unlikely. What I think is closer to the truth is that the Democratic Party leadership is oligarchic (with themselves as the oligarchs) and they find her acceptable because they’re convinced that she’ll do as she’s told. If she doesn’t they’ll jettison her as quickly as they jettisoned President Biden when they realized he threatened their continued rule.

I do not believe there has been a presidential election in my lifetime with two such lousy candidates. Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.

At Illinois Policy Patrick Andriesen and Jon Josko report that violent crime has risen in Chicago over the last year:

Chicagoans experienced 7.2% more violent crime from August 2023 through July 2024 than during the previous 12 months, with cases of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and robbery reaching five-year highs.

Residents reported 30,375 violent crimes through July. Cases of violent crime increased but the arrest rate for these felonies dropped to just 12.8%, the second-lowest level in the past five years.

Overall, robberies were the most common violent crime, accounting for 36% of incidents. Batteries and assaults were an additional 57% of cases.

That’s probably understated. As I have documented before a significant number of 911 calls requiring a police response go without such a response. That means that they are not even included in the police statistics. If that happens enough people stop reporting crimes.

So-called “smash and grab” robberies are a multiple times nightly occurrence, sometimes a dozen times a night or more. Recently, these have taken the form of using a truck or SUV, frequently stolen, and chains to tear the doors off a store or restaurant. Frequently, the robbers get very little from such robberies and the damage is much more costly than the robbery itself.

Whether homicides have risen or declined depends the period over which you are looking. They are down relative to a year or two ago, up relative to five years ago, down relative to seven years ago, and considerably up relative to a decade ago.

When people feel insecure they vote not necessarily at the ballot box but with their feet. Chicago’s population is the lowest it has been in a century. Much of the flight has been from the South and West sides.

I’ve already given my prescription: law enforcement, City Hall, the states attorney’s office, and the judiciary all need to be pulling in the same direction. What good does it do for a police officer to arrest a suspect if City Hall bloviates about root causes, the states attorney won’t prosecute and, if prosecuted, judges won’t convict.

Rather than leading off this post with the commentary that caught my eye this morning let’s begin with a local news story. From ABC 7 Chicago:

FOREST PARK, Ill. (WLS) — A 30-year-old Chicagoan has been charged after four people were shot and killed while asleep on a CTA Blue Line train early Monday, police said Tuesday.

Rhanni S. Davis faces four counts of first-degree murder, Forest Park police said.

Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins said the victims were sleeping when they were shot.

“Every loss of life is tragic, regardless of what their circumstances were. You know that they were special to somebody,” Hoskins said. “This was an incredibly unfortunate act, a criminal act, the loss of life that we all grieve for.”

The four adult victims are three men and one woman, police said. Three of the victims were found shot in one train car and one was found in another. Police said the victims were not robbed.

In another words a young man approached several people who were sleeping on an L train and murdered them. It has been suggested that one or more of the victims was homeless. The murders were not done for gain. The perpetrator apparently did it because he could.

I can think of several possible motives. Maybe the shooter was high on something. Maybe it was part of some gang initiation. Maybe he hates people sleeping on trains.

Now on to this post at the American Institute for Economic Research by David C. Rose on our fraying cultural framework:

The rise of civilization is the story of people living in ever-larger groups. In places like America, culture evolved even further, producing the moral belief that we should never do moral don’ts and use government, if necessary, to enforce them. Meanwhile, obeying the moral dos is to be treated as a purely private matter. In other words, we should mind our own business. This is so deeply ingrained in the American ethic that for us it’s like water to fish.

Being confident that, in most contexts, no harm would come to us led to a habit of extending trust to strangers unless there was a good reason not to. That is the essence of a high trust society. Since trust is a powerful catalyst to voluntary cooperation, this unleashed the power of freely directed cooperation as never before in human history.

Tocqueville’s own thesis for American success notes that many of our mediating institutions are highly trust dependent. These institutions were voluntary associations which is why they were epiphenomenal with a culture of freedom. It is difficult to imagine that such voluntary associations would last long if everyone in them was highly suspicious of everyone else.

Gallup has found declining levels of trust in most institutions and professions.

He continues:

Here from Statista is a snapshot of the decline in CTA ridership:

It’s clear what impelled the decline—COVID-19. That, too, is a form of decline in trust. People don’t trust that the person sitting next to them won’t give them a potentially fatal disease.

Will feral young men murdering people on trains increase trust in the trains, decrease trust in the trains, or have no effect?